I'm a PM and PO. I have a scrum team of 5 engineers and 4 QA. Sprints are killing me. It's so exhausting. No rest, ever. And the retros are almost purely negative.
Before becoming a PM I had no idea engineers were managed in sprints. Horrible.
I don’t believe in sprints
131–140 of 459 posts
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much every rant like this is a straw man rant overfitted to the writer's worst experience of what someone called "agile" in one of their companies once.
One of these days we might even hear of an example where following "agile" actually panned out. The question is - before year of the Linux desktop or after?
I've worked at 3 different companies now where the system worked well and teams moved quickly and created great software.
Unfortunately, that story is incredibly boring and goes against the tech blog hivemind.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do we need predictable deliveries? Let’s boil this down to first principles. Nothing about building software, especially innovative software is predictable.
> Nothing about building software, especially innovative software is predictable. This is basically exactly the point. It's incredibly difficult to predict building 'large software'. So, lets try a few things to help make it a little bit more predictable by trying to predict smaller increments. > Why do we need predictable deliveries? Say I'm building a piece of software - maybe an app the audience would use - for th…
This argument comes up a lot but this is a very narrow case. Neither you nor I are building software for the super bowl, and if we were building something with such high stakes we should start way, way early and concentrate on core functionality first. There's no real deadline for the feature we decided we needed last week.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#134I have come to like sprints by not caring if the teams I am on succeed or fail. I can then collude with other devs to water down the amount of work done a sprint.
Use their crappy tools against them and make sure your projects fail. You’ll be getting another job next year anyway.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#135I think the author completely misses the point or never worked in a proper agile team.
Imagine running a marathon without mile markers. Sprints are like mile markers they help you know and adjust your velocity and capacity to reach the end goal.
Without these sorts of tools you are just running without any sense of achievement or tuning to your teams performance.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#136This is nothing but a bad strawman from start to finish. Sprints are not made to help organize things, they're a tool to get more predictable deliveries. Their very short nature forces participants to construct tasks that are easier to estimate and therefore complete on time with a higher probability. This certainly adds overhead to an idealised scenario where people take the shortest reasonble route often enough and…
And because you have sprints, you create lots and lots of small tasks, then focus on them, and then team members forget the "big picture" of how everything should fit together in the end (if they were ever aware of it). And when all of those small tasks are done, you notice that the sum of all those parts is not what you set out to build initially, and you need more time to shape it into something that resembles what…
If you have subpar project managers, product owners, and lead developers on your team would you really be better off without structured sprints?
I guess, I'm asking, is there something specific about agile that makes a subpar team worse?
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do we need predictable deliveries? Let’s boil this down to first principles. Nothing about building software, especially innovative software is predictable.
Actually it is predictable, the majority of software engineers predict it at work every day (or every 2 weeks in sprint planning). Why do we need predictable deliveries? Because if Bobby from accounting doesn't have your piece of software ready by the 31st of November the company will be slapped by a fine from the IRS so large that you'll need to update your CV alongside all your colleagues from the now bankrupt comp…
> Why do we need predictable deliveries? Because if Bobby from accounting doesn't have your piece of software ready by the 31st of November the company will be slapped by a fine from the IRS so large that you'll need to update your CV alongside all your colleagues from the now bankrupt company you used to work for.
Yep, at the end of the day, the whole world can't run if everyone is a professor emeritus just freely exploring random possibilities, even if it would be hundred times more efficient to just "get out of the way".
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much every rant like this is a straw man rant overfitted to the writer's worst experience of what someone called "agile" in one of their companies once.
One of these days we might even hear of an example where following "agile" actually panned out. The question is - before year of the Linux desktop or after?
Essentially every project I've worked on in the last 9 years has been agile, most of them Scrum, and almost all of them succeeded in achieving their goals. There's a clear correlation on all of them between the skill of the project manager at applying the agile approach, and how difficult the delivery was.
Prior to that, I worked (as did most people) on waterfall-style projects, and the success rate was only about 50%.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#139I don't believe this is a strawman...at least from an outsider's perspective. As someone who has only ever written software independently, the very idea of agile and sprints (at least reading about them here and talking to friends) has kept me from ever wanting to work for a company that uses them. It seems like it would suck all the fun out of writing software.
Re: I don’t believe in sprints
#140Good teams don't need sprints, ergo sprints are bad is not a good argument. I'm not the biggest fan of SCRUM overall, but it exists for a reason. I saw in another thread/article here someone describe SCRUM/sprints as "training wheels for managers", and I feel that is incredible accurate. If I'm going to come in and start leading a team, I'm probably going to start with SCRUM just to get my feet under me and learn how the team works. After that, switching to kanban can be discussed, but there needs to be /some/ tracking to communicate timelines to the business at large.